In Accusative^x, Constructions^x

"Between" is a preposition. Pronouns that follow prepositions are always in the accusative case, not nominative. It's a rule, not a matter of opinion. Here are some examples that wrongly use the nominative.He wrote a book about she.The girl passed between he and I.The bullet passed...

Hi,I'm really enjoying this. You're making me think. I'm going to take your points out of sequence. I think I'm still replying to your post; if I misrepresent what you're saying, please correct me. First, the summary of what I'm going to say: A lot depends on theory, and...

Hello Dawnstorm,The terminology is not happy, admittedly; "middle voice" and "ergative" belong to other linguistic contexts, as has been mentioned; but I think it can be disentangled. It may be the case that "ergative" usage was once much more common in English....

The problem I see here is a muddle of syntax, pragmatics and semantics.In most of these sentences you could make a case for elided objects, that are taken care off by context (rather than considered irrelevant, as in "I am eating."):e.g. Yes, I saw X. X = anaphoric; referring to...

Any more? I honestly don't know. The book isn't organized that way. My comments were based on a few of her interspersed remarks, references, and footnotes throughout the book. The book is basically a list of verbs classified into groups on the basis of which transformations they can...

Beth Levin (English Verb Class and Alternations) calls this the middle construction. She mentions another construction -- alternation between causative and inchoative -- with the notation that another name for this one is "ergative". She lists "sell" as impossible in the...

Hello guysThank you for the replies. All of them are very helpful to me in thinking the problem. I think I had better explain the question more in detail.Actually the questioner asked at first the semantic difference between "He made her sing" and "He told her to sing". So, at first I explained...

.... -0- ok, let's put it this way: GB is nothing more than a module in the generative grammar, to be put on a par with such other modules of the theory as X', Case theory or the Theta Theory, although it has been quite incorrectly treated as though it were the whole of the Grammar (Chomsky,...

Fajita (1996) says that 1) is unaccusative/ergative and 2) is a middle construction: 1) The suitcase easily opens up. (No Agent) 2) The suitcase opens up easily. (Implied Agent) Do you agree?

Hello AnonI'm a mere English learner from Japan and my role here is rather an asker than an answerer. But if you don't mind, I'd like you to read my ideas about your question. I take "school" in "go to school" or "church" in "go to church" as an uncountable noun. As you suggested, "school" or...